Kissing Outside the Lines

by Diane Farr

  There is no hugging in this family, and since there is so little talking, there’s not much more to say after the joyous scream. My new in-laws sit there perfectly happy and thrilled but never say another word throughout dinner. Not one. Because that is their way. It is so completely different from my family, but lovely, too. And I really am getting used to it now.

  When we are walking to the car, I say to Seung, “Your mother is going to ask us not to take a honeymoon because she is worried.” And he tells me I am being ridiculous. But as Apa opens the door for me to get in the car, Ama shuts it. She looks at me and says, “Please don’t go to that island. Please stay here with us and be safe and I will take care of you.” And I look at Seung to please, please answer her because I feel so badly that the answer is hell no, I’m not missing my honeymoon!

  The next morning, Ama and Apa pick us up at the hotel and drive us to the airport. This week has been so magical because I’ve really felt like their child. They’ve given us our own little house at this hotel, along with a phone and spending money. They’ve thrown us a big party that I did not prepare for or clean up after in any way. We are thanking them profusely, and Ama is crying. She won’t stop touching me and I know that my status as a wife to their son has changed. As I step into the line for security, she takes my hand one more time.

  “This is the most important job of your life. Please be very careful. With our baby, Diane.” I bow to my mother-in-law, and then my father-in-law, and then take Seung Yong Chung’s hand. With my other hand I rub my belly like a happy Buddha and all the Chungs laugh with me.

  EPILOGUE

  “NOT GOOD ENOUGH to love? Who could be so base?” asked Edmund of Edgar in King Lear five centuries ago. Prejudice, when it comes to love, is nothing new. How ironic, though, that love could be the last prejudice even mainstream, seemingly progressive families can still teach their children at home—in the giant melting pot that makes up America. Most Americans do teach their children that everyone deserves an education, and that, of course, all people have the right to vote and that all children in the sandbox can share your toys no matter what color their hands are as they reach for your shovel. Yet privately, sometime after the sandbox years and around the time children begin dating, this inclusive sentiment becomes altered. In so many homes, parents tell their children, “But you can’t love one of them.” Frankly, the challenges my generation still faces when picking a partner are not only saddening but, when you come right down to it, also unpatriotic.

  So dare I say that if you are an American and enjoy all the opportunities this country affords you, then perhaps it is part of your duty to try to value all Americans equally until proven otherwise by their actions—if not all people, everywhere. Because if we had more nationalism in America—about who we are to each other inside this country, not just who we are as a superpower outside of it—perhaps we wouldn’t be looking at one another like members of another team. Particularly since we are all considered to be the same heathen, capitalist breed when we leave these United States.

  Race, like nationalism, is a social construct. Divisions based on race are basically lines drawn around a make-believe concept. The division only exists because we allow it to. I firmly believe it would make our country feel more like “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” if we would universally accept our national heritage for what it is—a culture of its own.

  I would argue the simplest place to begin this new paradigm, of culture before color, is with matters of the heart. I am not pretending this is an easy task, because even beyond those with an extremist anti-miscegenation belief, when some American children start dating outside of their race, religion, or culture, many of their loved ones also seem to slip into what I call a Joseph McCarthy coma. Suddenly, otherwise intelligent people believe every value they have imparted to their child is at risk because of a dinner date. The anxiety this coma brings on, of the “outsider on his or her way in,” prevents good people from remembering that everyone is someone’s child. And that somewhere, everyone has a mother who worries someone will be unkind to her little one. Differences in religious faith, too, seem to allow some people who are fevered in the coma to do terribly uncharitable things to save their child’s afterlife—no matter how many souls they crush in this life. And most sadly, the coma removes every fevered person’s belief in their own loved ones. It causes parents of all faiths, backgrounds, and skin colors to doubt their children’s ability to make good judgments about the character of others—particularly romantic partners—if they choose them without their parentally prescribed blinders on.

  But if all parents could see the person whom their son or daughter brings home to love as no more or less than a fellow human being—if not at least a fellow American—and judge them on that criterion, then couldn’t we make a difference, one person at a time?

  Because after all, our American culture, which England and the Europeans laughed at when we first had the audacity to emerge as a scrappy colony centuries ago, has always been a melting pot of traditions that immigrants have brought ashore with them: English and Irish, Sunni and Shiite, East and West Timorese, Tutsi and Hutu, Indian and Pakistani, and even those born within who have had to learn to coexist—like Red Sox and Yankee fans. All of this wealth of opportunity and culture is what made America a superpower. This is what we intended to share with the world by example: the philosophy of democracy—not just the armed forces behind it.

  * ASIDE FROM MY OWN FAMILY STORY, THE five couples I detail in this book are only one-quarter of the multiethnic and mixed-religion couples I spoke with from the time I started dating Seung until I married him, and those I formally interviewed once I was writing my personal experience for this book. The wonderfully dynamic and beautiful backgrounds of the people who were not included in this book encompassed people and couples as varied as a Vietnamese American war baby from the south and a Dutch South African in New Jersey; a Mormon Philipino who married a Catholic Mexican in Utah; a black Puerto Rican who married a Midwesterner in New York; a half African American and half Caucasian woman who was raised on an American Indian reservation in the Midwest and an English ousted Zimbabwean in Oregon; a Christian Scientist from Texas who married a Chinese woman in California; a Brazilian from Nebraska and a half-black man from Iowa; a black man from Georgia who married a Mexican woman from Arizona (who are both born-again Christians); a Georgian in Wisconsin and a German-Indian from Miami; an Austrian Jewish male who loves a Christian Swedish male (who are having a one-quarter Latin, one-quarter Asian, and half-Caucasian baby by surrogate); two married women and their daughter in Kansas (one who is black, one who is brown, and one who was adopted from China); and a Caucasian sheik man from the East Coast who loved a Caucasian Mormon female from the West Coast—all of whom were willing to share their experiences with me in hopes of aiding another union. And my two heaviest hitters—a Jewish New Yorker who married a Shiite from Iran and raised a family in Arizona, and a Turkish woman who married an Armenian man and raised a family in Texas—are living proof that love can heal even the most difficult pains of the past. Their wonderfully balanced and happy children have since become the proof and truth I hold tightly to as I begin parenting children of a mixed-race background, like theirs.

  Sadly, however, many of these original sixteen couples did not stay together. The reasons these unions ended varied, but I often found myself stuck between wondering whether their relationships ended because of the reasons they gave me or if their dissolution was somehow more influenced by the giant problems we discussed concerning their families’ disapproval of their relationships. It became hard for me to believe that external pressure from family was not contributing more to these breakups than some of the couples were even aware, because despite the differences in the final blows to these pairings, the initial pokes, jabs, and knockouts were all remarkably the same. So those are the stories I have chosen to share here.

  Of those who did continue their unions
from this first batch of interviews, I also had two interviewees who never heard from their own parents again after telling them they were marrying outside of their race. I wrestled with myself endlessly over not including these heart-wrenching stories. Without them, I did not feel like I covered the diaspora of mixed-race marriage in America today—but in truth, I haven’t even come close anyway.

  My personal experience is just my own, and the people I chose to speak to were those I had access to—who were brave enough to let me call them, again and again over a three-year span, only to ask ever more probing questions. All of the couples I interviewed are more or less from the same class and educational background as I am, and those included here are mostly from the more metropolitan coasts of this country, where perhaps the issue of loving outside racial boundaries is less a flashpoint than in more conservative regions of the country. To be sure, there are harder and more challenging stories out there, I know.

  But even being privy to some of these stories firsthand, I ultimately had to decide why I was asking all of these questions. What was my goal in amassing this information? As I became more attached to the couples I was interviewing, I developed a deep interest in creating a road map to our kind of marriage. My desire became less and less about wanting to dish on, expose, or dramatize the crossroads between race and love in any one family and let them run wild through these pages. Rather, my goal was to understand the sometimes hostile, often demoralizing experiences we confront when we love outside our race and find a way to survive them. I wanted to learn from a series of long-term partnerships how these people were able to navigate the prejudices so many Americans have been taught at home and come out, in the end, with a solid relationship—with as little, if any, sense of alienation from family or friends.

  So yes, there is more information to be considered in the landscape of interracial dating and perhaps even a retort to be made to these pages, but most important, there is a conversation that needs to be had. A conversation that Bill Clinton—several decades ago now—first asked America to begin “about race” and the integration of races in education, in work, and in living together in harmony in this country. He asked this so long ago that I was still a drunken, sexing starlet then, miles away from the advocate of homemade baby food that I am now. As I still saw myself as an individual at that time.

  Individualism is a key component in our American ideal. Part of our collective credo is that any member of our society can rise up from their humble beginnings and achieve success—in work or love. But with age and now children, I see myself, foremost, as a member of a community—many communities, in fact, that start with my family and branch all the way out to our planet Earth. My quest within these pages has been to rethink the boundaries I and so many others were taught growing up, and find a way to encompass the community that America is now, where no family is any better than anyone else’s based solely on the color of their skin, their economic status, or their philosophical, cultural, and religious beliefs.

  As I wrote this book, I spent much time worrying about how my words might be misconstrued, misused, misquoted, and otherwise “missed.” Ultimately, I decided to take the risk of writing my family’s darkest, most embarrassing, sometimes provocative thoughts to track and revere our collective evolution, and to be fully sure I’d eviscerated any prejudiced tendencies I had within my own vernacular.

  And I certainly had some schooling to do for myself.

  If you recall, my initial thought when I first looked across the room at Seung, at my friend’s engagement party, was That giant Korean guy is cute. Yes, I saw him as handsome, but I also saw him first and foremost for how he was different from me. For a few months after we began dating, I refused to acknowledge his race in my heavily Caucasian circle of friends because I wasn’t sure if commenting on it was racist. And then I worried that treating race with kid gloves was implying that there was something sinister about our differences. So then I put the words “Korean” and “Asian” back into my vernacular—with a vengeance. And they haven’t left me since.

  And then I had children. When they began school, I again had no idea how to address the plethora of families I met. Not just interracial couples and their children, or children who are different races from both their parents, but families with very different makeups: same genders, single parents, three- and four-parent homes, children living in temporary foster homes, children being cared for by nannies, children being cared for by nannies who didn’t speak English, and children who didn’t speak English themselves. And that was just my first week of preschool!

  I once again removed every marker from my conversation that might be outdated or unknowingly hurtful. My oldest child is now four years old, and yes, I still have so much to learn—about other families, sure, but also about how to raise my own. I thus began having all the same intimate discussions that I had with interracial, bi-faithful, and multiethnic couples, with individuals who grew up mixed-race between 1973 and 1985. I’ve been querying these interesting and amazing souls—as adults today—on what choices their parents made that did and didn’t work for them as individuals who straddle two or more races. (Can you smell my next book in that sentence?) And from them I am learning everything else I need to know to rewrite my family’s creation myth. Yes, the homework I gave in the class that I taught to unwed fifteen-year-old mothers over a decade ago has come back to me now. Because how I see the world today is different from how my family taught it. So I have some reconfiguring of my own mother myth to do.

  * I NO LONGER FEAR THAT MY CHILDREN’S RACIAL makeup will define them entirely. Now I think of my marriage and family as just one example of where America and the rest of the world are headed in the twenty-first century. Acceptance is becoming a sweeping tide. In fact, the year I married Seung, my then–TV show, Numb3rs, was sold to Korea. It went on to become one of its top-rated shows. I noticed this when I was suddenly invited to every foreign press event CBS did for the show. There were actors more well-known on the series than I was, but at a foreign junket, commentators waited to speak specifically to me. And they always wanted to discuss my marriage. In the years that followed, my children became a topic of discussion, too. When my father-in-law first flew to America after my son, Beckett’s, birth, he had suitcases full of gifts that Korean fans had dropped off at his office, after our wedding announcement in Seoul listed the name of his company. So in the end, my marriage to Seung has brought me more fans than fewer—especially in the Korean community.

  At my fortieth birthday party, surrounded by lots of friends, I was standing on a dance floor (read: coffee table, but you should know this about me by now), when I looked over at my husband, Seung Yong Chung. He was shaking his head at me. We were in Bali, staying in a house with our nearest, dearest, and most adventurous pals, trying to resurrect the life that Seung and I shared as a couple before we became parents.

  I was gyrating on yet another piece of furniture, trying to lure Seung over to me because, like I discovered on the first night I met him ... Seung Yong Chung is an amazing disco dancer. And he never stops smiling when he is dancing. It is magnetic. People all around him are drawn to look at the Giant Korean who can bust a move. And never do I ever fail to point out Seung to a stranger as “the Korean guy over there,” but in our own world, in our own life together, I haven’t seen him as a Korean or Asian person in a long time. He is just my Seung—who makes me feel like I won the lotto because he has never stopped loving me, no matter how anyone tried to tear us apart.

  After enough cajoling, Seung is on this table with me, doing his dance and smiling his big smile. As our friends shout his name and applaud his stellar moves, I know there is nowhere I’d rather be than dancing right beside this man, so happy to be his wife.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  EXTRA-SPECIAL THANKS and a big shout-out for Christine Johnson! She not only was with me on all three occasions when I picked up my husband, and watched my kids so I could write, but also read every single draft of th
is book when no one but she believed that’s what it would become. I’m sure a writer is only as good as her circle of honest friends. I’m so lucky to have you, CJ.

  And let me tell you about just a few of my smart, awesome, and capable pals—who took their time and their thoughts and bravely hammered them into my head. David Zucker—my first champion, without whom I probably wouldn’t have continued to pursue this for so long. Laurie Bailey and Gregg Kavet—whom I’ve called upon so many times for help that I’m always shocked when they return my phone calls at all. The New Yorkers who always help me get my art on: Daniel Laikand and Devrin Carlson Smith. And the sexy college coeds Jennifer Jacobson and Jessica Sitomer—I love you both, as well as Lauren Iannotti, the smartest editor I’ve met in magazines. Lest we forget, the only actresses I know who are smarter than they are beautiful: Navi Rawat and Eva Amurri.

  To the magical people who literally made this happen: Brooke Slavik, Kirby Kim, Brooke Warner, Abby Weintraub, and Merrik Bush-Pirkle (what a bonus you were!), along with the sorority of smart ladies at Seal. Your support has been palpable even in email. But extra-special love for Kirby Kim and Brooke Warner—he who went round by round with me in the incredibly “White” world of publishing and she who meticulously worked with me until the last moments of her pregnancy, and then still after her water broke!